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Hello everyone and welcome to Episode Seventy Six!  And I hope you all remain safe and healthy out there, and I want to wish all of you a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year.

Well it’s Sunday, and New Year’s Day, and that can only mean that the first episode of 2023 is a Herp Science Sunday show with Dr. Alex Krohn!  I’m happy to get one more show in before I head down to Peru in just a few days. This visit is a prolonged trip, actually two trips back-to-back, and I won’t return home until almost the end of the month, which means the next SoMuchPingle episode will drop the first week of February.  But as always, I will be bringing my mobile recording gear and I should come back with more content, complete with screeching jungle birds as a backdrop.

As always, I want to say thank you to all of the show’s patrons!  I’m grateful for everyone’s contributions and it does keep the show rolling along. And if you’re out there listening and you would like to kick in a few bucks, it’s easy to do, you simply go to the So Much Pingle Patreon page. You can support the show for as little as three bucks a month – less than a fancy cup of coffee! You can also support the show via one-time contributions via PayPal or Venmo (please contact me via email to somuchpingle@gmail.com).

This edition of Herp Science Sunday centers on serpent genitalia. The paper we discuss is “First Evidence of Hemiclitores in Snakes”,  published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society on 12/14/2022.  The paper should be available for download here, and as always, you can also request a copy of the PDF from me.  The co-authors are Megan J. Folwell, Kate L. Sanders, Patricia L. R. Brennan and Jenna M. Crowe-Riddell.  I believe Alex and I both got wind of it from a post made by Dr. Emily Taylor. And we nearly simultaneously decided we needed to talk to at least one of the co-authors of this paper, and soon, since so many people have been interested in the discoveries outlined in the publication.  Long story short, Alex and I had a lovely chat with co-author Megan Folwell recently, and I rushed it through the production process to have it ready for New Year’s.

Thanks for listening everyone! And as always, please keep the comments and suggestions coming, and please take time to rate the show on your podcast platform! The show email is somuchpingle@gmail.com, and there’s also a So Much Pingle group on Facebook, for discussion, comments, feedback, suggestions, herp confessions, entertainment partitioning ideas, tips for herping better, etc.

-Mike

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Hello everyone and welcome to Episode Forty Eight!  I hope you all remain safe and healthy out there.  We’re edging towards fall here and that means that a trip to southern Illinois is looming – time for another visit to Snake Road, to visit with friends and walk the road and maybe see a serpent or twenty.  I’m looking forward to it as I always do.

SMP Patrons!  I want to thank our latest Patreon member, Pearson McGovern!  Thank you so much for supporting the show, Pearson!  I also want to thank Tom Eles for his recent one-time PayPal contribution. Much appreciated, Pearson and Tom, nd thanks as always to all of the folks who help keep the show going. And folks, if you like the show, please consider supporting it via the So Much Pingle Patreon page. You can also support the show via one-time contributions via PayPal or Venmo (please contact me via email to somuchpingle@gmail.com).

For this week’s episode, we return you to the continent of Australia, and Dr. James Van Dyke is our guest. Van as he likes to be called, is a Senior Lecturer in Biomedical Sciences at La Trobe University’s Wodonga Campus, in Victoria, Australia (Van’s professional page is here). Now some of you may remember Van from the old Field Herp Forum where his handle was VanAR. As Dr. Van Dyke he has been living, working, and studying in Australia since 2012, and he’s been involved with a number of very interesting projects, and I talked with him about sideneck turtles and placental lizards and a few other interesting topics.

Areas of interest connected to Van’s work with sideneck include the TurtleSat Community Mapping Project, off to a great start with over 10K turtles mapped to date, and the One Million Turtles community conservation program which seeks to involve local communities in releasing a million baby turtles into Southeast Australian river drainages each year.

Thanks Van for coming on the show!  It’s cool that we could have a conversation from opposite sides of the planet, and hopefully the world will get better soon and travel becomes a possibility again.  And thanks for listening everyone!  And as always, please keep the comments and suggestions coming, and please take time to rate the show on your podcast platform! The show email is somuchpingle@gmail.com, and there’s also a So Much Pingle group on Facebook, for discussion, comments, feedback, suggestions, herp confessions, how to tell if you are a placental lizard, tips for herping better, etc.

Cheers!  Mike

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Hello everyone and welcome to Episode Twenty Six!  We’ve had shows coming from the United States, Mexico, and Canada, and now we get to add Australia to the list.  Last month I talked with Scott Eipper, who hails from Brisbane, up in southeast Queensland.  Scott and his wife Tie own and operate Nature 4 You, and though their company they are involved in wildlife demonstrations and education, surveys, consulting, and more  Scott and I talked about his work, but it was also great to chat about herping in Australia, and some of the differences and similarities to North American herping.  I enjoyed Scott’s perspectives, and I have to say that I got more than a little pumped about someday visiting Australia, and perhaps the date for ‘someday’ just got bumped up a little bit.

We also talked about Scott’s book projects (see above photo), co-authored either with his wife Tie or with Peter Rowland.  I have the frog book, and it’s pretty good – I will have to pick up more before I head over to you know where.

Patreon:  This episode marks the Patreon kickoff for the So Much Pingle podcast, and a number of folks were kind enough to respond the first day!  Many thanks and an SMP shout-out to Justin M, HerpMX, Jill Rials, Smetlogik, Joshua Wallace, Ryan “Jungle Deviant” Borgmann, Marty Whalin, Christopher Smith, Emily Taylor, John Burris, Kamil S, Brandon Kong, ChellsBells, James van Dyke, and Brandon Ballard!  Much appreciated.  To others in the listening audience, if you like the show, please consider supporting it via the So Much Pingle Patreon page.

And as always, please keep the comments and suggestions coming!  The show email is somuchpingle@gmail.com, and there’s also a So Much Pingle group on Facebook, for discussion, comments, feedback, suggestions, herp confessions, roos and wallabies, tips for herping better, etc.

Stay tuned for more episodes! And don’t forget to herp better!

-Mike